by Tim Wise
So too, Donald Trump’s recent critique of the president, which, rather than focusing on his policies, took aim at his academic credentials. Despite Barack Obama having graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law, Trump floated the idea (shortly before deciding not to run for president himself) that perhaps Obama hadn’t deserved to get into the Ivy League schools from which he’d graduated with honors.74 Indeed, Trump noted, he had many friends with kids who’d been turned down from those institutions despite “fantastic” test scores. This slam on the president—essentially a way of characterizing him as just another affirmative action beneficiary who probably only got into good schools because of race, thereby bumping some white kid from a slot they deserved—was nothing if not transparent. And coming from a man who had openly and proudly supported the McCain-Palin ticket75—whose members, respectively, graduated fifth from the bottom of their class and attended five schools in six years, barely graduating at all76—it reeked of hypocrisy and racial resentment.
None of these attacks by leading members of the conservative cognitariat have been accidental or incidental; neither are they the only examples of blatant appeals to white racial resentment and anxiety that have been seen in recent years. They are, however, a good indication that we are far from the post-racial moment that so many saw fit to proclaim after the election of the nation’s first president of color. Just as sexism failed to disappear in India, Pakistan, Great Britain or Israel following the election of women as heads of state in those places, so too, racism remains a reality in the United States, irrespective of the color of the nation’s president.
And for those of us who consider ourselves liberal, left or progressive—and perhaps voted for President Obama—we can’t be smug either. The truth is, a poll taken just a month before the election in 2008 found that a large percentage of white Democrats who intended to vote for Obama nonetheless admitted to holding any number of racist stereotypes about blacks to be true.77 So the fact that many were willing to carve out an exception for this one black guy, while still viewing the larger black community negatively, hardly acquits us of the charge that we too may have some stuff to work on. Research on subconscious and implicit racial bias has found the vast majority of us, myself included, have internalized certain racist and prejudicial beliefs about people of color.78 Not because we are bad people, let alone bigots, or even because we are “racists” at our core, but simply because we are here, and advertising works, and we’ve been subjected to a lot of negative advertising, so to speak, when it comes to those who are not white in this society.
For instance, news coverage of crime overrepresents people of color as criminal offenders, relative to the percentage of crime such persons actually commit,79 thereby contributing to widespread stereotypes about black and brown criminality. 80 As a result of years of conditioning, research has found, when whites are hooked up to brain-scan imaging machines and exposed to even subliminal images of black men, flashed on a screen for mere milliseconds, roughly nine in ten show dramatically increased activity in the part of the brain that is activated when a person is afraid.81 The fact that we are four to five times more likely to be criminally victimized by another white person than by a black person doesn’t appear to change our assumptions about who poses the greatest risk to our safety and well-being.82
Other research shows that we are far more likely to perceive aggression and violence in a person of color than in a white person, even when both exhibit similar behaviors. So, for instance, in one classic study, groups of whites were shown a video in which two men—one black and one white—were arguing. When the white man (who was an actor) shoved the black man at the end of the argument, only 17 percent of whites viewing the incident said they perceived the act as violent; but when the black actor administered the shove, three of four whites said they perceived the act as a violent one.83
In fact, sadly, even people of color sometimes internalize negative views about themselves. A recent study—mirroring similar research from more than a half century ago—found that African American children tend to prefer white dolls to black dolls, because they view the former as “good” and “nice” while they see the latter as “mean” and “stupid.”84
In many ways it’s not surprising that we would all be susceptible to internalizing these types of racial biases. Even without any direct instruction or conditioning, adopting views that are racially prejudicial comes easily in a nation such as ours. If we grow up in a culture where we are told that everyone can make it if they try, and yet we can see that many have not “made it,” and that certain groups are far worse off than others, it becomes almost logical to conclude that there must be something defective about those groups and something better about the groups at the top of the ladder. In other words, the combination of subjective ideology (the myth of meritocracy) and objective inequity (race-based stratification) creates the perfect recipe for the adoption of racist views as well as class bias. That so many of us would fall into that kind of cognitive trap hardly makes us bad people, let alone bigots. But it does mean we have issues. And it also means that unless we address these issues, the problems of institutional inequity will continue to fester.
And yes, I know it’s not easy to hear any of this right now. Millions of us are hurting as well. As the economy has imploded in recent years, we too have been caught up in the maelstrom of financial insecurity: long-term unemployment, lack of adequate health care, foreclosed houses or mortgages we struggle to pay on time, or an inability to afford our kids’ college education. I get it, I really do. Even if we sympathize with those persons of color who continue to face unequal opportunities and discrimination—be it overt or subtle—so long as we’re facing serious economic setbacks and uncertainty ourselves, many among us may not feel like focusing on such matters. But we must, because the inequities faced by people of color, and the way we have long disregarded those inequities or assumed they weren’t our problem, have led us directly to this current moment. In other words, our pain and their pain are connected, far more so than many of us may believe. Only by addressing the one can we ever hope to address the other.
To understand why this is so, we’ll need to closely examine this particular moment and how we got here. Specifically, we’ll need to interrogate some of the things that we as whites have long been able to take for granted, how those normative assumptions are being challenged at present, and how those challenges, and the social changes they portend, have intensified our insecurity, our fear and our anxiety about the future. In large part, the crisis of the current moment is only partially a material one; it is only partly about economic insecurity. More than that, it is about how a people can be set up by their own myths, their own internal narrative of their society—the story they tell themselves and others—in such a way as to leave them (us) ill-prepared for a changing and dynamic social reality. That is where we find ourselves today. It is at once a dangerous and yet portentous place to be.
The fact is, things are changing in America, and in many ways we haven’t been prepared for those changes. To be white has been to take a lot for granted over the years, and to assume that our normal was everyone’s normal; that our way of seeing the country and the culture—and that our experiences within both—were the ones that mattered, and were normative for all. We could take for granted that the political leaders would look like us, as would the cultural icons: they would all have salt-of-the-earth biographies and chiseled jaws and wear cowboy hats like John Wayne, or for that matter, Ronald Reagan riding horseback on his ranch. They would all be Christians. We could take for granted that our communities would be filled mostly with people who looked like us, and whose cultural and religious traditions were similar to our own. We would not have to see or think about people of color too often, let alone rub shoulders with them daily, on the job or in the supermarket. We wouldn’t see signs printed in languages other than English. We wouldn’t even have “ethnic food” sections in our groceries. And a lot of us rather prefer
red it that way. Above all, we could take for granted a certain level of economic security, and rest assured that our narrative about the country—what makes us great and what we stand for—would be a narrative over which we would have ultimate control.
As harsh as it may sound to some of us, Toni Morrison had it right when she suggested, “In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.” When it came to understanding and envisioning the ideal American, to be white long meant to be the prototype, the floor model, of that national species. True enough, there were hundreds of indigenous nations within the borders of what we now call North America, long before the arrival of the first Europeans. So too, the Spanish brought and then abandoned a group of Africans off the coast of what is now South Carolina in the late 1500s, several decades before the Jamestown colony and even further in advance of the Mayflower. So yes, one could make the argument that there are persons of color who were and are more “American” than the Anglo colonists who, in the early seventeenth century, began the process of conquest, believing as they did in their God-given right to lay claim to lands beyond their shores.
One could make that argument, could have been making it indeed for hundreds of years, but to what effect? No matter who was here first, whiteness and American identity have been joined at the hip for centuries; the sons and daughters of England, Ireland, Germany, Scotland and the like, have long been able to look in the mirror and see ourselves as the living embodiment of the American ideal. No matter their prior presence on these shores, the black, brown and red have forever and always had to lobby, petition, plead, scrape, fight and even die for the right to lay claim to that ideal as their own. They have been as perpetual outsiders, standing at the gates looking in, never as fully American as the lighter-skinned who resided within the walls of the national mansion and who—if not always immediately, certainly within a generation or so—were accepted as part of the family, jumping those who had been in line long before them.
Even the oft-heard and generally liberal cry that we are a “nation of immigrants” has presupposed that European identity and American identity were one. After all, indigenous people did not enter the country via Ellis Island, and neither did people of African descent. They were not immigrants except under the most tortured definition of that term. And so, in the classic Schoolhouse Rock cartoon “The Great American Melting Pot” we get the line: “America was the new world and Europe was the old,” delivered merrily and without the slightest misgiving. America’s melting pot concept was always conceived as a way to take people from various backgrounds and melt them into a new unitary whole, with the European taste predominating among the ingredients.
But now, white normativity is being challenged, and not only on one front, but on four: political, economic, cultural, and demographic. And each of these, in turn and especially together, poses a direct challenge to whiteness on yet a fifth front, the narrative front, by which I mean that battlefield of ideas within which the national character and story itself are defined and told to others.
First among the recent challenges to white normativity is the election of a black man to the very pinnacle of power: president and commander in chief of the United States of America. Although this may not seem a big deal to some—especially those who are younger and lack the historical context to understand the magnitude of such a thing—rest assured, there are millions for whom it is a very big deal indeed. Having grown up in a society where the leaders all looked like us, and had names like ours, and biographies similar to ours, to now have the nation led by someone whose father was African—not even African American, but African—and whose name is Barack Hussein Obama, and who lived outside the United States for a few of his earlier years, is to have our notions of political Americanness fundamentally challenged.
This is why during the run-up to the election, one could see T-shirts displaying the question: “If Obama wins, will they still call it the White House?” It’s why so many white folks could be seen on YouTube expressing openly their fears about a black president,85 wondering whether he would enslave white people or in some way try to exact payback for centuries of racial inequity, or questioning his citizenship or his religion in ways never attempted for white candidates. Birtherism—the school of thought that holds Barack Obama to be something other than American—is inherently about the attempt to “other” those whose backgrounds are different from the so-called national norm. It is a way of saying he is not one of us, no matter the documentation provided, no matter the mountains of evidence that attest to his citizenship.
Then of course there is the economic insecurity that has caught us so off-guard. Double-digit unemployment, housing foreclosures, unaffordable health care, failing schools: none of this is new for those who are black or brown, but for us it is horrifyingly unique. It has been roughly three-quarters-of-a-century—three full generations dating back to the Great Depression—since we have collectively faced that kind of financial trauma and anxiety. Although some among us have known hardship and deprivation, to be sure (and I count myself in that number), as a group, as a collective body, white America has not seen this level of uncertainty in a very long time, well past the memories of most of us still alive. So that too proves unsettling and keeps us up at night. Even when we’ve faced periods of hardship before, we always had the faith that things would get better, and relatively soon, that this too would pass, and that our children would certainly do better than we had.
People of color had never been able to take any of this for granted, but we could, and that confidence buoyed us, even in our roughest days. But now, that faith has been shaken. Our assumptions about the opportunity structure have been thrown off balance, and having been so ill-prepared for such a thing, we find ourselves suffering not only the material insecurity that comes from a faltering economy, but also the psychological trauma borne of realizing that everything so many of us assumed about our country and the system under which we live may well have been wrong.
The economic insecurity we are now facing, for the first time in a long time, poses a challenge to one of the most cherished elements of the American narrative; namely, that the nation is a land of opportunity and meritocracy, where hard work and initiative allow even the lowliest individual to rise in the ranks, to go from rags to riches, and to make a way for themselves and their families. The notion that rugged individualism is all that is needed to “make it” has little credence in a society where millions—including millions who had long had the ultimate faith in its veracity—find themselves struggling no matter their effort.
What most of us never realized, but persons of color have always known, is that the U.S. economy is far more similar to a game of “Chutes and Ladders” than “Monopoly.” It has long been a place where one’s personal strategy for success and wealth building mattered far less than circumstance, or even the lucky or unlucky roll of the proverbial dice. One could begin to move up, climbing the ladder of intergenerational advance, only to land on a downward slide that could and often did send you or your children back to the metaphorical beginning. For us, the game was always upward and onward—ladders without chutes—but for everyone else, the chutes predominated and were to be found around every turn. Coming to terms with the reality—a reality about which persons of color have long been aware—can’t be easy.
But in addition to the political and economic challenges to white normativity, there is more. A third concern is the rather dramatic cultural transformation of modern American society. Just a few decades ago most all the popular culture icons—in film, television, music and the like—were white like us. Even MTV, during its first several years on the air, refused to play any videos by black artists, with Michael Jackson being the first (and for a while the only) exception to a generally white rule. The cultural images beamed not only around the nation but also around the world were of a white America. But now, it is fair to say that American culture is thoroughly multicultural, with each thread of that cultural ga
rment being intrinsically interlaced with the others. From the foods we eat to the music we hear to the clothing styles, there is no way to separate the various cultural and ethnic threads any longer. Hip-hop has become the dominant popular cultural form in the United States, and comprises a significant part of the soundtrack of most young people’s lives, including most young whites. We’ve got rap artists making records with country artists, and that Hootie guy is now one of the fastest rising stars in Nashville. Even small towns now have Indian and Vietnamese restaurants, authentic Mexican food and bodegas. And let’s not forget the transformation of the religious landscape, in which we can see the addition of mosques and Hindu temples in communities that once held only churches and the occasional synagogue.
Finally, and perhaps most important, there is that rapidly changing demographic landscape that we keep hearing about in the media, or about which we ourselves whisper in hushed and occasionally nervous tones. According to projections, by no later than 2050, we will cease to be the majority in the Unites States. By then, we will have dipped to just under half of all Americans, while people of color will comprise the collective majority. In several states, this population shift has already happened, with whites comprising half or less of the population.